Université Canterbury

Writing Buildings

Writing Buildings (Canterbury, 14-17 Jul 16)

 

Canterbury, UK, July 14 – 17, 2016
Registration deadline: Jun 30, 2016

Registration has now opened for the Writing Buildings conference at the University of Kent, 14th-16th July 2016:
Only 100 places will be available at this extraordinary interdisciplinary event. The full programme is below.
– Iain Sinclair will be the opening speaker at our conference on Thursday 15th July

– Oliver Wainwright (The Guardian), Shumi Bose (co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale), Rob Wilson (former editor of Uncube), and Catherine Slessor, architectural critic and journalist, will speak at an event earlier the same evening chaired by Tom Wilkinson, history editor of the Architectural Review

– On the afternoon of Thursday 15th, we will hold a special showing of Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark at the Curzon Cinema in Canterbury and afterwards hold our first panel session.

– Jonathan Meades will close our conference on the evening of Saturday 16th July with a discussion on his work on architecture, chaired by Tom Wilkinson.

– Our keynote speakers Matthew Beaumont, Ian Dungavell, Alexandra Harris, Ben Campkin and Barbara Penner have all confirmed their attendance.

Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Catherine Richardson and Tom Wilkinson, directors Christina Chatzipoulka, conference administrator

Enquiries to: WritingBuildings@kent.ac.uk
PROGRAMME (subject, as always, to any unavoidable last minute
changes)
Thursday 14th July
14.00: Film screening at the Curzon Cinema, Canterbury: Russian Ark
16:00-17.30: Session

Buildings and Film:
Veronique Proteau. Russian Ark: A walk through Sokurov’s historical consciousness in the Hermitage
Semra Horuz and Godze Sarlak. More than one ‘traveled’ for: Mobility experiences within Istanbul.
Ben Liat Savin Shoshan. Brutalism in Israeli cinema in the 1960s
Adam Nadolny. Modern architecture of the 1960s recorded in the film image as an element of creation of the architectural culture in Poland

18:00-19:00: Digital Architecture: with Oliver Wainwright, Shumi Bose and Catherine Slessor. On the University Campus in the Grimond Building
19.00: Iain Sinclair (keynote speaker).
Friday 15th July
10.00 – 12.00: Parallel sessions
1: The Recreation of Lost Spaces
Charlotte Berry. Domestic buildings and domestic space in the records of fifteenth-century London
Iuliana Gavril. Architectural criticism before an ‘era of criticism’: ‘The Voice’ Byzantine
Sheila Sweetinburgh. ‘Going to visit’: An imaginary tour of Sir Peter Buck’s house in seventeenth-century Rochester
Alan Wadsworth. Writing farm buildings: Preservation through archives
2: Writing by Practitioners
Otto Saumarez Smith. Modernism in an Old Country: Lionel Brett as architect author
Jon Wood. The story from within
Xiang Ren. A right to write: Textual practice of buildings by a carpenter-architect and a barefoot-architect
Gillian Lambert. The messy bits of architecture

3: The Experience of the User
Matt Demers. Contestation and extension: ANT analysis of Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh
Claire Dwyer; Nazneen Ahmed; Stephen Foley; David Gilbert. Inventing a space for faith: experiments from West London
Raúl Martínez. A space-time glance at Gaudi’s Palau Güell: Diagrams of architectural experience
Edwina Attlee. Writing reading: articulating value

12.00: Matthew Beaumont, UCL: keynote address.
13.00: Lunch break
14.00 – 16.00: Parallel Sessions
4: Photography and Buildings
Michael Abrahamson. ‘From Latourette to Neiman Marcus’: On the disuse of images in architectural criticism
Ashley Mason. A coincidental plot: absent/present
Andy Lock. Writing buildings through and in response to photography : history and affect in autoethnographic responses to the architectural legacy of modern-movement churches by Gratton and McLean and Gillespie, Kidd and Coia.
5: Professional Critiques of Architecture
Philip Allin. Visual and textual clues to the architecture crisis: A metacritical analysis of Dutch architectural journals, 1966-2008.
Gabriele Neri. When satire meets architecture
Hans Ibelings. The marriage of building & writing
6: Spaces of Writing
Henriette Steiner. H.C. ANDERSEN WAS (not) HERE
Carolin Vogel. Letters from a Poet’s House: Rediscovering a forgotten place
Lauren Elkin. Insider/outsider modernism: women ‘write’ the Parisian maison
17.00: Ian Dungavell, former director.
18.00: Alexandra Harris, University of Liverpool: keynote address.
19.00: Conference dinner (to be confirmed)
Saturday 16th July
10.00 – 12.00: Parallel sessions

7: The Traveller
Adler, Gerry. ‘Wien schreiben – Writing Vienna’
Martin Beattie. Temple tours and Daddie: The letters and architectural writings of John Stapylton Grey Pemberton from Sri Lanka and India
Emma Cheatle. Architecture, lying-in and literature: writing maternal building histories
Elena Chestnova. Architectural History and the Travelogue: Semper’s history writing and the ‘manners and customs’ genre.

8: Literary Representations
Sandra Al-Saleh. Disappearances: Literary reactions to Kuwait’s built environment in the twentieth century
Esen Kara. The right to the city and the transnational American novel: LA riots and beyond
Jessica Kelly; Jason Finch. Voices from inside: Alternative perspectives and narratives of slum clearance in 1930s East London.
Angeliki Sioli. The bleeding Palace: a literary depiction of Hermitage over time
9: Site and Survey
Simon Bradley. Writing architecture: Pevsner and the Buildings of England
Samantha Martin-McAuliffe. Stone watching, wall gazing: architectural stories from the field
Julian Williams. Reconceptualising the estate
Alison Charles. Circumventing the invisible: Tracing the untold story of the ‘Dutch houses’ of east Kent
12.00: Ben Campkin, Urban Lab, UCL: keynote address.
13.00: Lunch break
14.00 – 16.00: Parallel sessions
10: Stones
Ross Anderson. On writings about the drawing out of stone: German late gothic Werkmeisterbücher and Baumeisterbücher in dialogue
Marina A. L. Mengali. The medieval invisible town: external wooden structures, balconies and footbridges of the stone façades in central Italy between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Owen Hopkins. The afterlives of architecture

11: Performance
Rosa Ainley. From experiment to application in Writing Alexandra Palace: Plurivocity as a method of cultural recovery of buildings
Ed Frith; Caroline Salem. Dancing about architecture is like writing about music
Peter Koch Gelshøj.  Composing buildings: Sonorous cathedrals, castles and chaos
Conor McCafferty. Writing the sound of the city: Analysing crowdsourced writing from urban sound maps

12: Creative Responses
Alex Selenitsch. Writing new spaces
Nora Wendl. Pages Have a Limiting Finality: The Poetry of Dr. Edith Farnsworth
Hila Zaban. Once upon a time in Jerusalem: Real-data and real-fiction in the story of the former Palestinian Baka neighbourhood in Jerusalem
17.00: Barbara Penner, UCL: keynote address.
18.00: A discussion with Jonathan Meades, writer and Film Maker.